Quotes from Margaret Atwood

the pores, the wrinkles, the nose hairs, the impossibly whitened teeth shoved right up in front of your eyes so you can't ignore them the way you would in real life. It's like being forced to act as someone else's bathroom mirror, the magnifying kind: seldom a happy experience, those mirrors.

Curiosity got the cat in trouble. Let's go.

He'd forgotten what delight felt like.

On my Tree of Paradise, I intend to put a border of snakes entwined; they will look like vines or just a cable pattern to others, as I will make the eyes very small, but they will be snakes to me; as without a snake or two, the main part of the story would be missing.

I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas.

This is a pattern humankind has repeated many times over the course of its history. When there is a crisis, whether real or imagined, culprits—whether real or imagined—must be found and eliminated.

Fallow state, the Gardeners would say. They used that diagnosis for a wide range of conditions, from depression to post-traumatic stress to being permanently stoned. The theory was that while in a Fallow state you were gathering and conserving strength, nourishing yourself through meditation, sending invisible rootlets out into the universe.

There are a great many buttocks in this room. I am no longer used to them.

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them to suit ourselves - our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies. Now that I've been one myself, I know.

will be less dignified, more painful, death will be sooner, (it is no longer possible to be both human and alive) : lying piled with the others, your face and body covered so thickly with scars only the eyes show through.

She said that wanting to be liked was a weakness of character.

if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that.

I always remembered what she looked like, the dried apple face, the silvery gray hair, the snapping blue eyes.

best friends led to whispering and plotting and keeping secrets, and plotting and secrets led to disobedience to God, and disobedience led to rebellion, and girls who were rebellious became women who were rebellious, and a rebellious woman was even worse than a rebellious man because rebellious men became traitors, but rebellious women became adulteresses.

Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From

This is one of the things I wasn't prepared for—the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing.

Some might call the overthrowing of an illegitimate government an act of treason; without a doubt, many have had this thought about me. Now that you have joined us, it is the same thought that others will have about you. But loyalty to a higher truth is not treason, for the ways of God are not the ways of man, and they are most emphatically not the ways of woman.

He will exist for her at least, he will be created by her, he will have a place in her mythology after all.

Some cheap do-it-yourself enlightenment handbook, Nirvana for halfwits.

Su madre aprovechó para decir que el problema con las personas de otra cultura era que nunca sabía uno si estaban locos o no, porque sus pautas de comportamiento eran muy distintas. Los agentes se mostraron de acuerdo con ella, con deferencia pero también con condescendencia, como si fuese una completa imbécil a quien había que complacer.

She's certainly old enough," said Aunt Vidala. "We have taught her all we can. If they stay in school too long, they become disruptive.

the thing was airborne. Desire and fear were universal, between them they'd been the gravediggers.

You can't couple a minimum access to food with an expanding population indefinitely. Homo sapiens doesn't seem able to cut himself off at the supply end. He's one of the few species that doesn't limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words – and up to a point, of course – the less we eat, the more we fuck.

Sometimes there would be couples, arm in arm—laughing, happy, amorous. Victims of an enormous fraud, and at the same time its perpetrators, or so I felt.